“Lina de Lima”, the voice of Quechua returns home

Lima, 23 Mar Giving life to the protagonist of the film “Lina de Lima”, which arrives in Peru after an international journey, has been one of the greatest challenges that Peruvian actress and singer Magaly Solier has faced to this day in the course of her meteoric career in the seventh art, always focused on the defense of equality, Quechua and the identity of their country. “It was a big challenge, (but) I also chose the character for this reason, because of his strength, because of his courage,” the actress admits in an interview with Efe, on the eve of the premiere this Thursday in Peru of this film that marks the fiction debut of Chilean filmmaker María Paz González. In the film, which was successfully screened in 2019 at international festivals, Solier plays Lina, a Peruvian migrant woman who helps her family remotely, while working as a domestic worker in a well-to-do house in Santiago, Chile, where she explores her own desires and identity. Mold breaker. Not only does Lina, whose rebellion and empowerment challenge the patriarchal mandate and distance her from the stereotypical image of the long-suffering migrant who only thinks about returning. Solier also does so by escaping the roles that had so far dominated her appearances on the big screen, such as in “Gods” (2007), “The Scared Tit” (2009) or “Altarpiece” (2017), pigeonholed into patenting the image of an Andean woman overwhelmed by dramas and injustices. The actress, tense during the interview, explains that she always rereads the script three or four times before accepting a role. “I am the one who chooses,” she insists, after mentioning that her decision inevitably involves assessing how much the film and its character contribute “in the fight for rights as women, especially as Andean women”. MIGRATION AND MOTHERHOOD “Lina de Lima” is a Chilean, Argentinean and Peruvian co-production, with which María Paz González wanted to talk “from humor and music” about themes that are often portrayed as dramatic, such as migration or motherhood. “It is important to question it, remove it and put it on the table,” the director of this film told Efe, who described it as “profoundly feminist” and which led Solier to win the award for best actress at the Chilean Film Festival. In fiction, González found the space she needed to give Lina freedom and generate the portrait of a character “who is not a role” but “a migrant woman who has many layers, who is a mother, is a worker, is a friend, is a caregiver and goes into sexuality”. The filmmaker says that when she saw Solier, she saw Lina, but for the actress “Magaly has nothing to do” with the character. Solier firmly avoids any personal question, even though she is asked about the apparent contradiction between her contribution to national cinema and the treatment received by the local media environment, which sometimes seems self-absorbed in highlighting her role as a mother for escaping the imagination of the woman who immolates herself for her children. “I didn't do my artistic career selling my personal life, that has nothing to do with everything I've achieved,” says the woman, who is a native of Huanta, a city located in the Andean region of Ayacucho, where she lives when she doesn't earn miles to go to make movies. PERU AND QUECHUA What it did sell in its more than twenty years on the big screen is its incessant transmission and defense of Peruvian culture, its customs and native languages, which is why in 2017 it was chosen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as “Artist for Peace”. “One of the main objectives when I started was to protect our Quechua and I am proud that I have achieved it, we are achieving it and today there are more defenders. It's not so much worry,” said the actress, who before making her film debut with “Madeinusa” (2005) dreamed of becoming a policeman. True to its premise, Solier composed Huayna and Creole melodies for “Lina de Lima” that sings and dances in this native language, which has more than 3.3 million speakers in Peru, 13.9% of its population. Carla Samón Ros